New rail director will inherit agency plagued by turnover

“It does make you take note. To me, it’s more about whether there’s something happening in the agency that’s causing them to leave,” - Mike Formby, HART acting executive director, who’s slated to leave the city and his role at the rail agency next month.

The Honolulu Authority for Rapid Transportation’s new interim director, who’s expected to be announced today, will inherit a rail agency that has seen high turnover among managers and board members in the past two years.
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The Honolulu Authority for Rapid Transportation’s new interim director, who’s expected to be announced today, will inherit a rail agency that has seen high turnover among managers and board members in the past two years.

Since 2015, at least a dozen directors, managers and other prominent personnel have left the largest public works project in state history, a Honolulu Star-Advertiser analysis found. They each logged between two and seven years working on rail, and their departure came during a tumultuous two years in which rail’s projected costs rose by about $3.3 billion.

Those who left oversaw various aspects of the project, including design and construction, operation and maintenance, property acquisitions, contract procurement and public communications.

“It does make you take note,” said HART Acting Executive Director Mike Formby, who is also slated to leave the city and his role at the rail agency next month to pursue other interests. “To me, it’s more about whether there’s something happening in the agency that’s causing them to leave.”

Formby, a former HART board member, said it’s unclear whether the turnover at “key levels” has hurt the project, but that he plans to address the issue with the board. Perhaps, Formby said, HART needs to conduct exit interviews to learn whether the pay, personalities, Hawaii’s remote location, the “challenges and issues” affecting rail, or some other issue is spurring departures.

Five of the rail board’s nine directors have also left the project since 2015, including all three of its former chairpersons: Carrie Okinaga, Ivan Lui-Kwan and Don Horner. Some of them pursued other opportunities while others were pressured by city leaders to leave.

A sixth board member, former U.S. Rep. Colleen Hana­busa, who serves as its chairwoman, is slated to leave before the Nov. 8 general election that could send her back to the U.S. Congress.

HART reports that 35 employees have left the semiautonomous agency since January 2015, with seven of the positions still unfilled. The agency has a staff of about 112, said HART spokesman Bill Brennan, and it’s budgeted for up to 139 employees. Brennan said nearly 40 HART employees have been with the agency since 2011, when it launched to oversee the rail project.

This month, HART devoted part of its website’s interview show, “Honolulu on the Move,” to the benefits of working there and the various positions available. HART Administrative Services Officer Paul Romaine told Brennan that it’s “definitely” a challenge to find the expertise the project needs.

“One of the concerns for the Federal Transit Administration was that we would actually be able to staff HART with people that were able to build this rail project, since obviously there’s not a lot of rail experience here in Honolulu,” Romaine said. “We’ve been pretty successful attracting superqualified candidates.

“We’ve been pretty lucky,” he added.

Brennan said the agency devoted the monthly interview to employment opportunities because “we’ve had lots of people asking about working at HART.”

How unusual HART’s turnover level is compared with other rail projects and agencies isn’t clear, but similar mainland agencies said they value institutional knowledge and low turnover rates.

“We have seen a lot of stability at our organization,” said Susan Tierney, a spokeswoman for Valley Metro, which operates the Phoenix area’s bus and light-rail service. “We have tremendous talent here at the agency that has remained with the agency. We have really remained constant.”

TransLink, the transit agency for the Vancouver area in British Columbia, touted its reported 2 percent turnover rate for 2015. “We offer a variety of employee-retention incentives,” TransLink spokeswoman Cheryl Ziola said in an email Wednesday.

In August, when Dan Grabauskas resigned as HART’s executive director after four years, Hanabusa said, “There’s always a concern about the loss of institutional knowledge.”

“But we … have very good staff,” she added. “So we believe that we have the knowledge that we need within the staff structure as well.”